Film reviews 2011

This page is part of the Visual Arts section.

Films in Leicester | Cinemas in Leicester | Film reviews and news for 2010.

On this page: We review The Black Swan | We review Brighton Rocks | We review the film about Facebook, The Social Network |

23rd June

High Hopes, students from Leicester looking back

A film by Mark Craig documents the lives of students who graduated from Leicester Polytechnic School of Arts (now called De Montfort University) in the early 1980s. A group of them were brought back together by one of their number, Mark Craig, to talk about their experiences of being students and to look at where they have got to, thirty years on.

Mark Craig was at the then Leicester Polytechnic and graduated in 1981. His film documents the lives of seven of his fellow students and looks at where they had got to at the time his film was made. The film brings into focus the very real differences between student life thirty years ago and what it has become today.

We met four of the people featured in the film.

Kirsty

Kirsty is now a local artist here in Leicester. She graduated in 1983 with a BA (Hons) in Fine Art. She knew then she wanted to be an artist and to earn a living from the skills she had developed whilst on her course. She got a job in Leicester after she finished her course. Still living locally, she now gets involved in community arts and has been a professional free lance artist for over 20 years.

See Kirsty's web site.

Alyson

Alyson graduated in 1981 from the graphics design course. She got a job in Leicester when she left the course. Since then she has been consistently employed until she started working for herself in 1989.

See Alyson's web site.

Clive

Clive graduated in 1981 and when he left the course he "hadn't a clue what he wanted to do." He was glad just to have finished the course. Now he is a successful freelance illustrator. He did however get a job in Leicester, after doing his degree.

See Clive's website.

Mark

Mark Craig made High Hopes and brought seven of his class mates back together to feature in the film.

Back the 1980s student had grants. They didn't have loans to pay back. The grants were enough to live on during term time if you were careful with money. At the end of three years, students could walk away with their degrees and, for most of them, little if any debts.

Graduate retention

It was interesting to hear DMU Vice-Chancellor Prof. Dominic Shellard and others talking about the need to retain graduates here in Leicester after they have finished their courses and what the city would need to do in order to achieve that. So seeing that the four people we met, who were in the film, all got jobs in Leicester back in the 1980s, put that issue into perspective.

Leicester needs an Art Gallery

Kirsty, as working artist, thinks that there is a crying need for an art gallery in Leicester, where local artists can exhibit their work. We have reported on today's DMU students exhibiting their work for short periods of time, even while they are on their courses. This does not however meet the aspirations of professional artists who want a more permanent space in which to show their work to the public.

Art students might well leave the city to find more fruitful environments, possibly in somewhere like Nottingham, were there are serious galleries not present in Leicester.

Kirsty also told us that there is a need for more art festivals in Leicester, where the work of local painters can be celebrated. She thinks Leicester is missing out on opportunities to attract and to keep serious, professional artists.

Prior to the screening of the film, Grierson Award Winning Director, Mark Craig told the audience, gathered in Screen Two, that it was "great to be back in Leicester." He thanked De Montfort University for allowing him to film today's students and campus and, in the film, we saw rarely seen archive footage of the college as it was in the 1980s when it was called Leicester Polytechnic. The class of '81 had been in the Fletcher building, which still stands but Mark hardly recognised the rest of the campus, which looks very different now from what it did 30 years ago.

It was pretty much the same when I studied there between 1989 and 1991 when I graduated with an MA in the Leicester Business School. Co-Producer Natasha Dack said she was grateful for the help that had been given by EM Media and her company, Tiger Lily Films.

The changing face of student life.

High Hopes (82 mins) brings into focus the changes in student life over the past 30 years. It reflects the change from directly paid grants to loans, the way that the buildings of the campus were completely open, whereas now you have to have key cards to get through any door. It reveals the terrible conditions in the private housing sector that some students had to endure, compared with the nice new halls of residence that offer safe environments.

In those days the Arts School made 'mug shot boards' containing pictures of the students with their names underneath. A sort of paper-based fore-runners of the faculty face-books that emerged following the introduction of computers.

It was startling to realise that, as one of the 80s students remarked, computers had only just been invented and even the early Apple Macs were something they could only dream of. Whilst students nowadays can do pretty much everything on their laptops, arts students in the 80s had to ply the tools of their trade: pen, pencils and lots of paper. As one of them said in the film, "I spent hours and hours painstakingly rubbing on Lettraset (a kind of plastic film with printed letters on that could be rubbed off on to sheets of paper.) I remember it well, when I was artworking pages for the magazines I worked on in the old days of offset litho.

Printed letters had to be rendered by hand using pens and pencils. Well at least they really got to understand how printed letters were constructed and what serifs were.

The film contained a lot of insightful shots of student life as well as amusing anecdotes and recollections. It was a kind of oral-history of student life, capturing what it was like to study in the early 80s. Music figured in many accounts, with some liking punk bands and others being passionate about metal. Several talked about going out to see live bands.

I thoroughly enjoyed it. It was cleverly produced with some very cunningly animated scenes to illustrate the dialogue. I found it thought-provoking and insightful.

Find out more about High Hopes.

The Social Network

Everyday I go on Facebook. In fact, I go on Facebook several times a day. Everyday. So I went to see David Fincher's film about the creation of Facebook. OK, so I also bought a copy of the book about the foundation and history of the world wide web. Yes, I like reading about things that matter to me. I enjoyed the film Social Network very much. Why? Because it was a well made film. It won three Oscars. Because it told a story about a landmark event in modern history.

The film opens with computer genius Mark Zuckerman (played by Jesse Eisenberg who actually looks like the real Zuckerman) when he was at Harvard in 2003. He is a student and he's in his dorm at Kirkhouse - what we would call a 'Hall of Residence'. He sets up a small site called Facemash - a kind of online version of the official University Facebook, directory of students common to most US Universities in those days.

Two guys, The Winklevoss Twins, see it and ask him to work on their web site, some rather dumb-ass project. Before Mark does anything for them he 'hits on the idea of doing a campus-wide site which he calls The Facebook. It gets over 22,000 hits overnight and crashes the whole of the Harvard computer. He realises he is on to something. Early on in the film, we realise that sites like MySpace and Friendster were already running and proving to be not only really popular but also worth a lot of money.

Despite the bursting of the 'dot com bubble' in 2000, the Internet continued to grow. In 1997, Microsoft acquired Hotmail for $400 million. The world had got used to witnessing the meteoric rise in the value of leading Internet sites. Mark is working with his friend Eduardo Saverin (played by Andrew Garfield). Eduardo supplies some money to get the new project up and running, thus acquiring an interest in its ownership.

I could get my head round what was going on. After all, I watched it happen. The growth of Silicon Valley, the emergence of multi-million pound internet sites. The mantra was "getting there first". Just as Bill Gates was there first with Windows, so Mark Zuckerman was a pioneer of social networking. One of the signs that a site is working is that phrases get into everyday speech. Very early on we got used to phrases like "email me". When people started saying "facebook me", Mark realised that he had unleashed something big.

Half way through the film he meets up with Sean Parker (played by singer Justin Timberlake), the founder of Napster, the site that allowed people to download free music tracks. The two men click; Mark sees eye to eye with the charismatic but somewhat wild Sean. The film did a brilliant job of building up characters, comparing and contrasting the various characters. It was well casted with convincing actors bringing the characters to life. It never got bogged down in 'techie' stuff, it steered clear of the awful jargon barrier and kept focused on telling the story.

The narrative chose to dwell more on the human relationships and to the reflect how the US does business - through the courts. Initially Cameron Winklevoss is reluctant to sue Zuckerman over the Twin's failed project, arguing that the honour of Harvard is at stake. His twin brother Tyler shares no such misgivings. When asked if he has finished Facebook, Mark replies that projects like this are "never finished". It reminded me of the phrase I have been using with my clients: "There is no such thing as a finished web site."

Like most of the other great web sites - Google, Hotmail, Youtube - they continue to grow and develop, almost week by week. The crux of the film is about the value of ideas. Valuable ideas have a price but it also uncovers the other price of soaring success: the price of personal relationships and loyalty in the face of big money. The strap line of the film is "You don't make 500 million friends without making a few enemies."

The central story of the film is a court room hearing in which firstly the twins are suing Zuckerman for allegedly stealing their ideas. It's a battle over intellectual property rights. This moved on to the second court hearing in which Severin sues Facebook for downgrading his financial interests, a case he eventually wins to the tune of $65 million. Zuckerman is driven by a different set of values. A non-businessman, he thinks that it has to be "cool". It will be a success if people see it as being cool. There is a scene where Zuckerman and Parker meet for the first time and on the way out Park er suggests that the word "the" be dropped from the site's title. Zuckerman immediately realises this is right and his admiration for the new contact rockets.

Parker tells Zuckerman that Facebook has grown in a generation. Whilst Zuckerman is getting the new social network out to more and more US Universities, Sean Parker takes it over to the UK and gets Universities there to start using it. Sean Zuckerman is depicted as a "geek", someone who understands computer code more than people.

Eduardo Severin was his closest friend at Harvard, may be his only friend. In the end they fall out, Sean Parker playing a role in driving a wedge between them. Eduardo has small ideas. Sean has the experience to think big and to move things along quickly. He is a man of vision and he connects with Zuckerman's thinking in a way which Eduardo did not.

It was a fast moving and gripping film that unravelled plots on several levels - the meteoric growth of Facebook being set against the backcloth of friendships and personal relationships, trust, loyalty, betrayal and driving ambitions. It was a very American film, just like so many that have portrayed the student life in US schools, the life of commercial wheelers and dealers in the Skyscrapers of big cities and above all the great love that they have for litigation and courtroom drama.

There are several scenes of parties in which people are playing loud music, drinking heavily and taking drugs. Zuckerman however keeps his nose fairly clean and comes across as Mr-Nice-Guy, even though he ends up as the world's youngest billionaire.

Facebook, founded in February 2004, is now a worldwide social networking site with hundreds of millions of users. I see that President Obama is to pay them a visit soon. It's purpose is about "Giving people the power to share and make the world more open and connected" and "Facebook's mission is to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected", we read on the Facebook web site.

During the film various characters talk about the motivation behind the site's success - the desire of people to find out things about people they know. It mirrors what happens in real life. People find friends and want to know things about them, people make new friends through existing friends. So, as a piece of contemporary social history the film was interesting. Even to someone who has never used the Internet, it would be an engaging film if viewed purely as a story.

The plot features real people, most of whom are still living and an aspect of the Internet - social networking - that impacts on the lives of millions of people. So as drama-documentary it is engaging; as a story, it's a gripping tale. So, yea, well worth seeing.

Social Network is showing now at the Phoenix

Brighton Rock

In a dark, edgy thriller with convincing characters and settings and sumptuous camera work, Joffe has done a superb job in updating the Boulting Brother's classic of 1947, which starred Richard Attenborough.

Set in the Brighton of 1964, Director Rowan Joffe has adapted the plot of Greene's novel and reworked it. The opening sequence tells you that it is not going to follow the story of the novel in precise detail. The film brings into sharp contrast the rock and candy-floss seaside holiday resort with the low-life brutality of gangland criminals and pulls in the infamous teenage riots of the 60s between the mods and the rockers. Certainly the location shots make it look like the Brighton I knew in 1964, as far as I can remember, but then I was only 17 at the time.

"The Boy", Pinkie Brown (Sam Riley) is portrayed as a cold, heartless, calculating hoodlum, who would stop at nothing to further his criminal career in protection rackets and extortion. His humourless face rarely smiles, locked into a steely-eyed stare as is mind concentrates fanatically on the chess board moves of the gangland business. Pinkie is pursuing gangster Fred Hale and kills him under the pier. Rose (Andrea Riseborough), a vulnerable though strong-witted young waitress at Snows teahouse, briefly met Fred on the Pier, before the murder. The two of them are photographed together on the pier.

Anxious to recover the incriminating photo, Pinkie goes to Snows and is served by Rose. The actor who plays Pinkie (Sam Riley, 31) captures Greene's character (except that he has dark brown eyes whereas, in the book, they are significantly described as a sinister "slatey gray"). In the book Pinkie is 17; Sam Riley looks older (by modern standards) but could pass as 17 in even 1964 and certainly so in the 1930s days of the book, when men matured and looked older at a much earlier age.

Pinkie wants to take over the mob from gang leader Spicer. Hale was a friend of Ida Arnold (played by Dame Helen Mirran) who runs Snows. Mob leader Colleoni (played by Andy Serkis of Gollum fame) tells Ida that "Brighton is on the move", a reference to its growing popularity with the holiday seeking public as well as with the teenagers who are terrorising south coast towns.

Pinkie is taken in the by the Police who question him about Hale's murder but as they have no evidence, they let him go. The police know that Spicer is now running Kite's gang.

The love tryst between Rose and Pinkie is kept deliberately ambiguous. Whereas some scenes suggest that Pinkie really does, deep down, have some affection for the girl, in others we see him as merely using her in a cynical effort to further his plans and devices in the small-town crime world. The anthem of doomed love plays out against the backing of grimly violent evil and the rioting that engulfs the happy-go-lucky seaside resort.

Pinkie takes Rose (on his stolen scooter) to some high cliffs. He questions Rose about Hale and the mob, trying to find out how much she knows. He takes her to the edge of the cliff; he asks her if she is scared. She replied "not when I am with you", they kiss and the scene ends its portrayal of the developing and ambiguous relationship between the young gang leader and the somewhat innocent waitress.

Spicer asks Pinkie to buy him out of the gang so he can leave Brighton, allowing Pinkie to take over the gang. In an acutely worked episode, Pinkie goes to see mob boss Colleoni, to offer a joint operation but his real plan is to get Spicer removed. The scene at the Palace pier shows Colleoni's men attacking Spicer but they also turn on Pinkie in a disturbing act of subterfuge. The mob's battles are set against the backcloth of riots between the mods and the rockers. Pinkie puts Spicer on the back of his stolen scooter and rides to the pier; on the way he gets into the middle of a huge group of mods on scooters. Crowds line the street to cheer them on while the rockers jeer and curse at them.The gangs fight it out under the pier as the mods and rockers battle it out on the beach.

Pinkie uses the rioting teenagers to make his escape from the mob. The good thing about this film is that it tells a story in the 'present', no flashbacks, it has one continuous time line. Pinkie kills Spicer by thrusting a stick of rock into his throat but unconvincingly tries to make it look like a suicide.

Pinkie marries Rose at a registry office, knowing that a wife cannot be compelled to testify against her husband. After the marriage ceremony, we see Pinkie and Rose on the pier, where she asks him to go into a booth a make a record of his voice. As Rose stands outside the booth, unable to hear what Pinkie is saying, she imagines that he is putting his love for her on record. In fact, he is saying that he does not love her, that, in fact, he hates and despises her but he prefaces his rant with the words, "You asked me to say, I love you ".

Ida confronts Rose, interrogating her about what she knows. Ida goes to see Colleoni in an effort to protect Rose from Pinkie. In an attempt to end the girl's life and remove the risk of her 'squealing' on the gang, Pinkie takes Rose back to the cliff tops and asks her to commit suicide by shooting herself.

Spoiler Alert! If you haven't seen the film and don't want to know how it ends, look away now.

The scene jumps from the cliff top drama to Ida finding one of the gang members and making him drive her to the spot where Pinkie said he would take Rose. In a nail-biting climax, the two of them arrive at the cliff top, almost as Rose is about to pull the trigger of the gun she is holding to her ear. The gang member fights with Pinkie, who tries to get hold of the gun to kill him, but, as they wrestle on the ground, Pinkie pulls out of his coat pocket the bottle of Sulphuric Acid that he used to frighten Rose, earlier in the film. Struggling to get the top off the acid bottle, it shatters in his hand and the acid sprays over his face and eyes. In his agony, Pinkie falls over the edge of the cliff to his death. We see Pinkie's corpse, his face burnt off by the acid, dead on the beach below.

In the closing scenes, Rose has retired, heavily pregnant with Pinkie's child, to a convent. The Abbess, like Ida, tries to convince her that Pinkie never really loved her and she should try to forget him.

In the final scene, she plays the record they made on the pier, for the first time and hears Pinkie's voice saying "I love you" but the tracks are damaged and she lays there listening to the words being repeated over and over, never getting to hear the rest of the message.

The casting is good, the acting superb and the camera work sharp and evocative. It is a totally different version from the original classic production of 1947and Riley's character is played very differently from Attenborough's performance. Transposing out of the 30s into the 60s achieved very little, as the mods and rockers aspect occupies only one scene and is just a montage against which the plot is played out.

Whilst I thought the camera work was superb, the monastery music was decidedly odd, linking back into the religious motif that runs through the film but i'ts still only a backdrop. It suggests that even in the midst of the evils of gang crime, people can still believe in Heaven and Hell and make a pretence of faith. Like the mods and the rockers, the scenes in the church, Pinkie praying to God during his flight from the mob, the religious elements are just for decoration, rather than having anything approaching the depth that we find in Greene's work. They salute Greene's preoccupation with Catholicism but there is no deeper layer behind the narrative of the story line in this film.

Joffe's film is an exciting and visually stimulating piece of film noir; well casted and acted, very different from the earlier version and a good two hours of cinema. Worth seeing, whether you have read the book and seen John Boulting's version, or not.

Good things about the film: sharp camera work and top class acting from Sam Riley, Helen Mirren, Andrea Riseborough and John Hurt. Keeping to the language of the 1930s in the dialogue even though it would have been an anachronism in the mid 60s.

Bad things: lack of attention to contemporary details in the mods and rockers scene and the rather irrelevant migration of the setting to the 1960s.

You can see Brighton Rock at the Phoenix through to 3rd March.

See more films at the Phoenix.

The Black Swan

Coming back to the Phoenix in April

Reviewed by Trevor Locke

Darren Aronofsky's darkly disturbing story about classical ballet is a taut and often shocking portrayal of the rigours of perfection and professional pressure. Brilliant camera work and casting makes it a gripping film that is heading for the Oscars and Bafta awards.

Rightly so, because Natalie Portman in the lead role of Nina, the psychotically troubled ballerina is convincingly realistic. The role of Thomas, the Artistic Director (Vincent Cassel) is well played but by no means as solid.

The film endlessly slips between the real world and the bleak nightmares and paranoid hallucinations of the ballerina. The camera follows the action in a hand held way, using the technique of real life news journalism and documentaries, first developed in the Blair Witch Project.

It's fast moving scenes follow the progress of aspiring dancer Nina whose ambition is to be cast in the role of the the Swan Queen. Having secured the role, she becomes obsessed that other dancers are trying to take it away from her. Tchaikovsky's great classic ballet is often regarded as having the sweetness and candy flossed chocolate box of a beautiful romance; in fact it has a dark side, a grim underside of evil and Aronofsky follows this in his film.

From the stunning opening sequence, the film is constantly backed by the luscious music of Swan Lake, either in full orchestration or on the piano. Set in New York, the cast are rehearsing for a "...stripped down, visceral and real ..." interpretation of the Russian masterpiece. The challenge to the lead role is to deliver a convincing portrayal of the White Swan and then transform into an equally convincing evocation of the Black Swan, moving from white to black, from good to evil, in the same character.

Various scenes vividly portray the bone cracking, joint crunching rigours of ballet. The ballerina is meant to float effortlessly across the stage, gliding with almost super-natural grace. To achieve this, ballet dancers have to train like Olympic Athletes, having even more agility, combined with considerably more strength than weight-lifters and more tenacity than rugby players. They have to punish their tiny, skinny bodies remorselessly in the pursuit of perfection of effortless movement. Nina has spent years, relentlessly pursuing control of her body and her movements but in so doing has sacrificed her emotional life.

The film portrays professional dance, at this level, as shot through with sexual passions and pressures, dancers mortifying themselves emotionally and physically in the pursuit of discipline and perfection. The Artistic Director, Thomas, asks Nina to "loose herself in the role", to become the character she is portraying on stage and to make the White Swan as equally convincing as the Black Swan.

Nina, however, lives at home with her cloying mother, a dancer who gave up her career to give birth to her. The tension between the two women boils and creaks and ends in (imaged) violence. The mother treats her little princess like a child; in order to get into the black role, Nina scoops up the profusion of white, cuddly, soft toys in her bedroom and stuffs them into the garbage chute.

She goes out to a night club with another dancer, takes drugs, gets drunk and gets laid in the men's toilets, the night before her first performance. She (actually or in fantasy) brings the other dancer back to her flat for a night of hot girl on girl action through which she looses her inhibitions and develops her dark side. Did she really do this or was it one of her fantasies? The film adeptly confuses the real story of the plot with Nina's fantasies and dreams and we are left wondering whether it actually happened or was just part of her mounting psychotic delusions.

This is where Aronofsky handles the story line with brilliant precision. After all, the story of Swan Lake is a theatrical fantasy, a tale of light and dark, good versus evil, spinning out a monumental tale on stage. It's why Swan Lake is so widely acclaimed as the world's most famous and celebrated Ballet, beloved of dressy lovers of high art and dance school students alike and the least understood.

The film, like the ballet, peels off the sequins and feathers to reveal the naked passions, the bodily agonies and intense mental pressures that are said to lie underneath. The Black Swan graduates from being a dramamentary about ballet into a horror movie that keeps you on the edge of your seat, makes you jump (like all good horror flicks do) and has a surprise ending that you were least expecting. It finishes with a monumental finale of high drama. Just like Turandot or Madam Butterfly's suicide, Tosca flinging herself off the wall to her death or Brunnhilde riding into Siegfried's funeral pyre ... in that regard the finale of the film is in keeping with high art.

The film noir's dark and disturbing scenes are counterpoised with those of the corps de ballet in their glistening white tutus gliding across the stage in the light of the moon. But that's after you have seen moments of sexual abuse, scenes of lesbian love making and gut wrenching moments of extreme violence laced with plenty of sweat and gore.

This tense and gripping drama ends with some digitally enhanced special effects where you see the skin of the ballerina morphing into the skin of a bird, which then mystically sprouts black feathers as she reaches the climax of the dance and becomes the Black Swan, her body taking on the persona that has been growing in her mind. Two hours of spell-binding story-telling keeps you on the edge of your seat and blasts you with scenes you would not associate with classical ballet.

Beneath the polish and glitter of all great art (it would have us believe), there lurks a dark underbelly that the audience never sees. Aronofsky lays it bare and in so doing creates a masterpiece equal to that of Tchaikovsky. I can hear choruses of professional dancers hooting with laughter about this; but then, thousands of people love Phantom of the Opera and Hamlet. All that Aronofsky has done is to tell a story. It's a tale of the Brothers Grim, proving that even in the twenty first century, an audience can enjoy a dramatical plot whose roots reach back thousands of year into the rise of ancient Greek theatre. It's just the technology that has changed. It deserves an Oscar.

The Black Swan is showing at the Phoenix through to 3rd February.

Other reviews:

Read the Flickfilosopher review

Cinemas in leicester

Phoenix Square - Digital Media Centre

4 Midland Street
Leicester
LE1 1TG

Tel: 0116 242 2800

Phoenix Square web site

Located in Leicester's Cultural Quarter, Phoenix Square is a newly built complex housing an independent arts Cinema, digital gallery, flats, studios and a cafe bar.

To see other films showing this month visit the Phoenix web site films page.

Other pages you might like:

Our feature on digital arts in Leicester.